I have been thinking about this poem by the Russian poet, Evgeniy Baratynsky, for a while now. I remember coming across a translation, perhaps the one by Peter France which I link to below, just as I was getting onto a flight back to the UK a few years ago. After finding the original poem online, I spent much of that flight comparing the two. Baratynsky’s language is cold, dry, and rational. Though he was a contemporary of Pushkin, I need to turn to a dictionary far more often when I read him than his fellow poet. Reading the original poem then I was struck both by its tortured syntax and by its lack of beauty. It seemed to say almost nothing, and say it poorly. The translation was much more impressive.
My Russian is far better now than it was at that time. And I have also come to appreciate Baratynsky. Indeed, I’ve translated a few of his poems here already. Today I return to the poem with fresh eyes and a greater willingness to engage with the original. I hope this translation can give a sense of its quiet intensity.
“My talent’s poor, my voice has little weight…”
My talent's poor, my voice has little weight, But still I live, and on this earth my life May yet to others give a kind of joy. Those still to come will find my heart and voice Within my verse. How can I know? My soul Will meet with theirs and make a new connection, And as I found my friends in my own life, I'll find a reader in posterity. (1828)
I don’t have altogether much to say about the poem. When I read it now, it gives me a sense of purpose in my own writing. It is a reminder that whatever success or failure we may have in our own lives, there is something magical and redemptive about the thought that one day someone will turn to our writings, discovering us by accident, and consider themselves lucky for it. Baratynsky these days is less well known than other Russian poets of the 19th century – Fet, Tyutchev, Pushkin, et al. He is almost my secret – a poet who is entirely mine, one claimed by no reading list.
Of course, I love the Great writers too, as much as anyone else and probably more than most. Yet it’s hard to imagine that they love me in return – they have too many admirers, and too little time for us all. In a way, the poem reminds me of a story I heard while on the island of Kizhi in Karelia, in the north of Russia. Baratynsky, it’s worth mentioning in passing, had a great love for the region. On this island there are a great many preserved wooden churches (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site), some of them gigantic, being part of the island’s central complex, and some of them tiny. I took part in a tour, and one question the guide asked us was why bother making a tiny church when you can see, perhaps a ten-minute walk away at most, a huge church which is far richer and more beautiful.
Why build a small church when something like this is only a stone’s throw away?
The answer turned out to be simple. Back in those days, the peasants believed that God would be less likely to hear their prayers if they went where everyone else did. They were worried their concerns would be drowned out among those of so many others. And so they built their own smaller churches and chapels. Here, they hoped that God would listen to them.
In the same way, the lesser writers, though they may have less power and talent, may offer us in their own writings a kind of cosy warmth, and a feeling that our reading of them is not in vain. Through us they live again, and the magic of their literature passes on into a new generation. In me, Baratynsky has indeed found “a reader in posterity”.
Osip Mandelshtam on Baratynsky’s Poem
Osip Mandel’shtam is one of the major Russian poets of the 20th century. I have never enjoyed his poems much, perhaps because I had to study them for my exams, rather than read them for pleasure. One day I hope to return to him and try again, but not just yet. Anyway, in one of his essays (“Concerning an Interlocutor”), he has some comments on Baratynsky’s poem. I thought these were worth translating too. Perhaps you’ll find them interesting.
“Every one of us has friends. Why shouldn’t the poet turn to his own friends, to those people who are naturally close to him? A seafarer in a critical moment throws into the ocean waves a sealed bottle with his name and a record of his fate. Many years later, wandering among the dunes, I find it in the sand, read the letter, learn the date of the event and the final moments of the one who has passed away. I had the right to do this. I did not print a private letter. The letter sealed within the bottle was addressed to whoever found it. I did just that. That means I am the secret addressee.
“Reading Baratynsky’s poem I experience the same feeling. It’s as if such a bottle has fallen into my hands. The ocean, with all its massive power, decided to help it in its journey, and the feeling that you get when you find such a bottle is that Providence itself has had a hand in delivering the message to you. In the casting of a bottle into the waves and in Baratynsky’s poem there is the same clearly-expressed idea. The letter and the poem are both addressed to nobody in particular. But nevertheless both of them have an addressee: the letter’s is that person who stumbled upon the bottle in the sand, while the poem’s is “a reader in posterity”. I would like to know who among those who have come across this line of Baratynsky’s has done so without a quiver of joy and a terrible shudder, such as when someone unexpectedly calls out their name.”
I hope you have enjoyed my translation. If you have any questions or thoughts, do leave a comment below.
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is the second woman writer of Russia’s 19th century who I’ve read, the first being Karolina Pavlova. (I wrote about Pavlova’s novel, A Double Life, here). Where Pavlova produced a flawed but original novel about the life of a young aristocratic girl who falls prey to the schemes of the men and older women surrounding her, using satire and mixing poetry and prose in a way that has more in common with the German novellas of the early 19th century than Russian literature, Khvoshchinskaya is not particularly stylistically original at all. Her stories make use of the 19th century’s staple: drab and workhorse realism.
In spite of her uninspiring prose, what Khvoshchinskaya brings to the table is a commitment to shining a light on the struggles that the average woman in Imperial Russia faced. In her task she is rather more subtle than Pavlova, whose anger often undermines the effectiveness of her arguments, and in many ways she anticipates Chekhov. The difference between them is that Khvoshchinskaya focuses on women’s suffering specifically, at least in “The Boarding School Girl”.
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya herself. Like the Brontës, there were multiple Khvoshchinskaya sisters, all of them writers.
The Boarding School Girl
The first thing to have in mind when reading Khvoshchinskaya is that like the Brontë sisters, she too used a male pseudonym – V Krestovsky. What that meant in practice is probably that there was some pressure on her to self-censor to appear more “manly”. “The Boarding School Girl” begins with what might be such an attempt. The story’s first scene, in spite of its title, is occupied by two young men – Veretitsyn, and Ibraev. They are in a small administrative centre, somewhere deep inside Russia. Veretitsyn has been there for over a year – they are walking in his garden – while Ibraev has just arrived, to take up an important administrative position at the head of some department. Veretitsyn, we soon learn, is almost the opposite. He is watched by the police, a certified “dangerous influence”, and in exile. But they are old friends and want to catch up.
Towards the end of the meeting they notice a girl through the bars of Veretitsyn’s garden fence, walking in her own garden with a book and studying hard. In spite of Veretisyn’s assertion that “I don’t want her to be happy”, he decides to go and speak to her. And thus begins the acquaintance that sets in motion the events of “The Boarding School Girl”.
Our Heroine: Lelenka
Our heroine is Lelenka, a girl of about sixteen. She is introduced to us not by her physical characteristics, but by her mental ones – she has a good memory, and is a hard worker. Her eyes are not beautiful, but “clear and direct”. And indeed, Khvoshchinskaya predominantly uses a kind of anti-description of her, opposing her to typical women and, indirectly, to men’s typical definition of them. Lelenka’s look “was not coquetry: her calm gaze did not challenge, didn’t seek out a conversation; she did not even close her book”. She speaks a little with Veretitsyn through the bars of the garden wall – a prominent symbol for her lack of emancipation, and then she goes home.
They meet again later. We are perhaps expecting a romance to come of this. After all, Veretitsyn, the exiled revolutionary, fits neatly into a class of characters known as “superfluous men” who populated Imperial Russian literature since either Eugene Onegin (Eugene Onegin) or Pechorin (A Hero of Our Time), depending on who you ask. The most recent prominent example for Khvoshchinskaya would probably have been Rudin, in Turgenev’s novel of the same name, published in 1855. Superfluous men are intelligent, but ineffectual. They speak well but they are unable to commit to any of the radical ideas they espouse. As a result they either die bleakly, live bleakly, or are redeemed by a poorly-written angelic woman.
Veretitsyn acts as a kind of alternative teacher for Lelenka to those at school. He reveals to her the artificiality of her life, and puts into her head the idea of freedom by making her aware of how little of it she has: “You are a wonderful, obedient, kind daughter: you are only acting according to your duty” (emphasis mine). She should instead live for herself. Veretitsyn is just playing around – he’s terribly bored, and Lelenka is a pleasant distraction. When he gives her Romeo and Juliet to read the tone of his thoughts is derisive: “well, let her educate herself!” he thinks. It is a “violent joke”.
But for Lelenka herself, his words are not such a joke. She realises that she has indeed never been doing anything for herself. The usual translation of the title of the story, “The Boarding School Girl”, is not perfect because Lelenka does not actually board at school, but goes there every morning, accompanied by a servant from her household. “The School Girl” is probably better. Either way, the emphasis is on education. Lelenka is constantly learning in the story, but not only at school. After speaking with Veretitsyn she realises her education has consisted simply of memorising things, never of thinking for herself.
An Unhappy Family
We see her lack of choice in her domestic life. “Raised in fear”, the children of her family know only the route to their school and back. At home she is told by her mother “sew, sew, or read a book”. But she starts to recognise her parents’ hypocrisy, the way that they are constantly “puffing themselves up” (the Russian word “важничать” comes directly from the word for “importance”) in spite of their lowly position and poverty. Lelenka, however, only recognises her unfreedom – she has little power to remedy it. She flunks her school exams, completely pointlessly, as an act of rebellion. But that’s all she can do. Khvoshchinskaya makes use of passive constructions in Russian to show her lack of agency, for example “All of these clothes were placed upon Lyolya”.
Her parents decide without consulting her that, as she’s now sixteen, she must get married. In addition to parents, social constraints are another layer of restraints placed upon women in the 19th century in Russia. At one point her mother is bartering concerning the price of the dowry for Lelenka – a kind of concrete reduction of Lelenka from human being into an object with a price attached. At another, a friend of her mother’s asks her if she speaks French and asks to listen, even though the friend doesn’t even understand it. Lelenka is told “you just need to submit, submission is what’s needed”, and that “you need to thank god for sending you someone to take care of you”. God is the final tool for keeping Lelenka in her place.
The Revolutionary and his Protégée
Veretitsyn was just having fun with Lelenka. He had no idea that his words could have had an effect on her. But she discovers freedom: “Let them make of me a woman in the kitchen, a worker… but I’ll not be a slave”. When Veretitsyn hears that she has failed her exams he is shocked and changes tack. He now starts defending the system he had earlier criticised. “You understand that people need to live with each other; that’s why we have laws, and rules, and convention”. But it is too late. Lelenka knows that Veretitsyn has “spoiled [her] character”, but she can do nothing but continue down that path. She thinks for herself – “Will I really have children one day? Will I really live just as they do?”
The answer is no. Veretitsyn, giving her Shakespeare, opened her mind to a new way of existence, one dominated by passion and personal interest. The description of reading (in French) is filled with joy – words were now “understandable without the slightest effort, everything just translated itself in her mind, in her heart, not from the words but from some kind of feeling clearer and more rich than words themselves”. Veretitsyn, unable to liberate himself from cynicism, successfully liberates Lelenka from her own circumstances.
In Petersburg
The second-to-last chapter ends with Lelenka being told that she has to marry. She refuses, but we don’t expect her to manage to hold our forever. The final chapter, taking place eight years after the events of the rest of the story, seems at first to confirm this. We are taken to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Khvoshchinskaya gives us a panoramic view of the people here – ladies and serious men. The descriptions focus on tight, restricted clothing. But instead we are taken not to a “lady” but to a “female artist”: it is, of course, Lelenka. There she meets among the visitors Veretitsyn, and she invites him home to chat.
A lot has changed. She is no longer Lelenka (a diminutive, showing her immaturity), but Elena. When Veretitsyn offers to carry her artist’s things she refuses, and when they stand by the banks of the Neva there is no longer a fence separating them. They are now, at last, equals. We learn that after hearing about the marriage Lelenka fled to her aunt’s, in Petersburg, and there she started going to a new educational establishment. The teachers there noticed her talent for painting, and helped her to develop it. She now has complete independence, financially as well as in every other sense – she knows three foreign languages, does translations and paintings. “I am free”.
Veretitsyn has declined where Lelenka has grown: “with the years one gets quieter”. He disagrees with her, calls her and her generation egotists. For him, it is enough that things get slowly better. She has permanently rejected love as a “yoke” and now lives for herself. When the story ends, we hear the “rustle of a pen upon paper” as she works. The sound “rustle” in Russian is normally associated with dresses, but Lelenka is not like those others. With that simple word choice, we see how far she’s come.
Conclusion
“The Boarding School Girl” is at its most interesting in this final chapter. The earlier portions catalogued Lelenka’s unfreedom, but here Khvoshchinskaya is really going against the patriarchal grain by ultimately showing that freedom is not only possible for women, but actually enjoyable. However, I’m not convinced by it. I guess it’s just the stodgy reactionary in me, but Lelenka’s freedom is marked by an unacknowledged loneliness that will only get worse as time goes on. She may be young and free and happy now, but I can’t see it lasting forever.
Freedom is as much a yoke as love is, and I find some merit in Veretitsyn’s view too, that Lelenka’s work is “just another source of opium”. In the end, Khvoshchinskaya herself doesn’t really take a side. Lelenka certainly has grown up – and that this is a good thing nobody can reasonably deny – but the endpoint she thinks she’s reached may only be the first step on a more challenging journey to full maturity. But that continuation of her story, unfortunately, was not written.
A good short article with extra information on the story is here.
I wrote about the Irish writer Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, at the beginning of this year. I didn’t think it was a bad book, but I wasn’t sure how far I agreed with the treatment of politics in it, either. I’ve now finished Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, which has recently been made into a TV show, and as before I’m left pretty unsure of what to make of it. Rooney has a huge amount of talent, especially for realistic dialogue and the little details that make life in the 2010s life in the 2010s. But I’m struggling to escape the feeling that all these little details don’t actually add up to a cohesive, worthwhile, package. I’m a little worried that Normal People is like a grand façade on an ancient building that a tourist excitedly enters, only to discover there is nothing inside but dust.
Below I want to explain what I mean.
The title card of the first episode of the Normal People TV show. I haven’t seen it, but I’d like to.
Hero and Heroine: Connell and Marianne
The first thing I noticed about Normal People is that we have two point-of-view characters, rather than the one of Conversations with Friends. Connell is from a working-class background – he doesn’t know his father, and his mother works as a cleaner at the house of the second character, Marianne. Marianne is our heroine, the daughter of two solicitors, and at the top of the socio-economic pecking order in the small village in West Ireland where Marianne and Connell go to school. The arrangement is effective, in part because Rooney draws both characters well.
By having a working class main character Normal People positions itself to go for a class critique, but by also having Marianne as a representative of a higher class Rooney can dispel, within the context of the novel, certain extreme views that a class-based viewpoint can tend to create. For example, Normal People takes pains to show that though Marianne has money, that doesn’t mean her life is smooth sailing – and not only because she’s weird and non-conforming, but also because of factors outside of her control, like a violent brother and a violent (though dead) father.
The plot of Normal People takes us from the end of the two’s time at school, right up to the end of their time at university. During that time they grow as people, both apart and together. At times they are in a relationship, at times they are barely speaking. Normal People is the record of their changing fortunes, faced with a world that doesn’t see either of them as normal, and of their attempts to fit in.
Class and Language
Normal People is a book that has a lot to say about language in it, just as Conversations with Friends did. Rooney has a great ear for subtleties. On the first page, when we meet Connell, who is the best in their group at school, his simple comment that “Marianne did pretty good too” is already enough to tell us that he is not on the same level in terms of class, however clever they both are. Another time where language serves to convey differences in position is when the two of them discuss how Marianne’s mother employs Connell’s mother, Lorraine. “I don’t think she pays Lorraine very well”, says Marianne. “No, she pays her fuck all”. Even though the language is simple, Rooney does a good job of showing resentment within it. Marianne is only intellectually affected by her mother’s decisions; Connell is directly, financially, touched by them.
Unlike Conversations with Friends, Normal People does not rely too much on text messages and emails. I think this is a good decision, not because we don’t communicate by them, but because they do reduce the immediacy of things that can be done in person – after all, it’s the job of the author to arrange their characters in such a way as to make the story lively. Too much veracity is always a bad thing. At one point, Connell thinks of writing a novel using only emails, but dismisses the idea. He decides, quite rightly, that it would probably be too gimmicky. Unfortunately we don’t use emails like we once used letters, and trying to pretend otherwise would be foolish.
Trinity College in Dublin, the most prestigious Irish university. It is not Connell’s natural environment, not by a long shot. But for Marianne, who’s been brought up in a world of privilege, it’s easy for her to fit in.
The Lads and Sex
Normal People also has a lot to say about sex and violence. That’s probably good, because these things are rather important. One thing I liked is that Rooney does a lot to show that men can suffer from sexual violence, just as women can. Early on in Normal People we hear about a schoolteacher, Ms Neary, who has kept Connell back after class a few times, and once touched his tie. Connell feels he can’t talk about it with anybody, though, because “people will think he’s trying to brag”. Just as women often can’t talk about sexual assault for fear of their concerns being dismissed, so too can men struggle to be taken seriously. Connell later meets Ms Neary again, after his graduation, and she attempts to sleep with him. He manages to escape, but it’s a horrific moment in part because we know how alone he is against her.
Connell is part of a group of lads his home village and it puts him in an awkward position, especially once he starts meeting more intellectual people in Dublin, where he and Marianne both go to university. At one point a friend is showing him naked photos of someone they both know without her consent. Connell is forced into awkward silence, and when he doesn’t actively approve of his friend’s action the friend attacks him for it, saying “you’ve gotten awfully fucking gay about things lately”. Among the lads, of course, a misogynistic view of women is normal, and the response shows how much pressure someone like Connell is under to accept it – the alternative is being cast out. But again, things are more complicated than “boys just being boys”, because the same lad, Rob, dies later on, an apparent suicide.
There’s no defending his sexism. But as with elsewhere in Normal People we’re reminded that our outward expressions can be ways of hiding uncomfortable truths about ourselves. I remember at school when it occasionally turned out that the people who insulted others as “gay” the most were those most in danger of turning out to be so themselves. I don’t mean to say that Rob was gay. Rather, even though he wasn’t portrayed a good person, all the same we should understand that he would have had depths we could not see.
Violence and Humiliation
Rooney’s pared-down, numb style is particularly good at dealing with violence, thanks to its directness. When Marianne’s brother grabs her arm, there are no flowery metaphors to get in the way of the sheer unpleasantness of it. But far worse than that is when Marianne is assaulted at a bar:
Let me get you a drink, the man says. What are you having?
No, thanks, says Marianne.
The man slips an arm around her shoulders then.
The man eventually squeezes her breast, in public, without her permission. It’s a difficult thing to read because its easy to imagine how it was.
Marianne eventually ends up in a few equally nasty relationships involving humiliating sexual acts. The first is to a rich kid, Jamie. I was pretty disappointed with him, because unlike Connell and Marianne, Rooney’s depiction of the confident right-wing student was cliché-packed and depthless. Concerning a man who robs Connell, Jamie says:
“He was probably stealing to buy drugs, by the way, that’s what most of them do”.
Being someone from the same background as Jamie, I know plenty of people like him. I know plenty of people who think like him, but I do not know anyone who talks like him. In a sea of well-written characters, he sticks out as being a lazy caricature.
Marianne also has a sexual relationship with a Swede while she is on an exchange. This relationship also involves him humiliating her. Both of these relationships are the result of Marianne’s idea that she is a bad person and therefore deserves to be punished. Her sex with Connell is notable because of the absence, at least from his end, of any desire for violence to be involved. He is aware of the violence he, as a man, could wield against her, but the thought causes him disquiet rather than pleasure.
Time and Style
Normal People has a particular structure to it, one that I came to appreciate by the time that I finished it. Each chapter begins with a moment setting the stage for some event. For example, Connell is interrailing and he knows he will soon arrive at the place where Marianne is staying. Then we go back into the past, for a kind of flashback. These flashbacks all serve to add tension to the moments, to set the stakes. For example, why is their meeting likely to be awkward?
I think this has a particular advantage over a linear chronology. In a linear chronology we usually either have to wait to get to moments of great friction, or we end up reading a work that strains credulity through a clockwork use of scenes of scandal. Generally, our lives just go on smoothly. Representing this in a realistic novel would lead to a boring work. But by jumping forwards to a moment of crisis and then going back to explain why it is significant Rooney makes every chapter feel useful.
Except, this only goes so far. Eventually you’re left feeling dislocated, like you’re being jerked backwards and forwards on a broken-down train that’s trying to start running again. Rooney’s habit of making the time between chapters huge is also not something I like. It’s hard to feel close to people when we meet them once every three months. And it also kind of undermines the overall structure of the book. A bit like Nabokov’s Pnin, each chapter of Normal People feels more like a short story than a continuation of a novel. Connell’s relationship with Marianne is also so on-off that it feels you could mess up the order of the chapters and still get a workable novel out of it at the end. Perhaps that says something about modern relationships, though. Whatever the case, it doesn’t make for a particularly enjoyable reading experience.
And that’s in part why I haven’t spoken about the plot, because there isn’t really one. Connell dates a nice girl called Helen, but they fall out and break up (off the page! – another thing I don’t like is that Rooney uses time-skips as an alternative to actually writing important moments). Connell gets depression. Marianne goes to Sweden. Marianne has a fight with Jamie. Connell writes a story. People drink a lot and sleep around. The order isn’t quite right, but who cares. It’s not particularly interesting, and the fact of the time shifts means even serious topics, like depression, feel kind of temporary, something that we’ll forget about as soon as the chapter ends.
Conclusion
I get it. Normal People is the zeitgeist. People who are cool and I like have recommended me the same books that Rooney namedrops here – The Golden Notebook, The Fire Next Time. Normal People is also extremely difficult to criticise because a lot of the criticisms can be reasonably attributed not to the book, but to us. The jerky sense of time, the vapid content, all reflect a kind of modern condition. The book wouldn’t be popular if this hadn’t touched a real nerve.
But we need to move beyond describing our problems, and think about their solutions. Rooney’s language, I think, gets in the way of finding them. It is singularly incompatible with any kind of higher feeling. When we’re told, in a football match that,
Everyone screamed, even Marianne, and Karen threw her arm around Marianne’s waist and squeezed it. They were cheering together, they had seen something magical which had dissolved the ordinary social relations between them.
This is telling, not showing. The style doesn’t leave “showing” as a possibility. Real emotion, from the characters rather than us, demands either longform or dialogue. Rooney’s dialogue is fantastic, but not every experience can be spoken. Some can only be felt. The style is extremely limiting in this regard.
In the end, I suppose I liked Normal People, just like I suppose I liked Conversations with Friends. But I was left wanting something more. People need something more. I hope one day Sally Rooney will write a novel which will provide just that.
